iX Information Library

FreeNAS 11.2-RC2

November 16, 2018

We are pleased to announce the general availability of FreeNAS 11.2-RC2. This final release candidate for the 11.2 series is considered to be feature-complete and ready for testing. Users, especially those who use Plugins, Jails, or VMs, are encouraged to update to this release in order to take advantage of the many improvements and bug fixes to those subsystems. Please report any bugs to https://redmine.ixsystems.com/projects/freenas/.

To update to this release, select the 11.2-STABLE train in System → Update. Should you need to return to the 11.1 series after updating, reboot and select that boot environment from the boot menu.

These major features are new in the 11.2 series:

The login screen defaults to the new, Angular-based UI. Users who wish to continue to use the classic UI can select “LEGACY WEB INTERFACE” in the login screen.

Beginning with this release, there are two published versions of the 11.2 User Guide: one contains the screenshots for the new UI and the other contains the screenshots for the legacy UI. The availability of both versions of the Guide is to assist users as they become familiar with the new UI during the transition period before the legacy UI is deprecated in a future release. Both versions contain a menu selector, making it easy to navigate between different versions of the Guide.

The rewrite from the old API to the new middlewared continues. Once the API stabilizes and the rewrite is complete, api.freenas.org will be deprecated and replaced by the new API documentation. In the mean time, to see the API documentation for the new middleware, log into the new UI, click on the URL for the FreeNAS system in your browser’s location bar, and add /api/docs to the end of that URL.

The boot loader has changed from GRUB to the native FreeBSD boot loader. This should resolve several issues that some users experienced with GRUB. GRUB was introduced as a temporary solution until the FreeBSD boot loader had full support for boot environments, which it now has.

The Plugins and Jails backend has switched from warden to iocage and warden will no longer receive bug fixes. The new UI will automatically use iocage to create and manage Plugins and Jails. Users are encouraged to recreate any existing Plugins and Jails using the new UI to ensure that they are running the latest supported application versions.

Virtual Machines are more crash-resistant. When a guest is started, the amount of available memory is checked and an initialization error will occur if there is insufficient system resources. When a guest is stopped, its resources are returned to the system. In addition, the UEFI boot menu fix allows Linux kernels 4.15 and higher to boot properly.

Cloud Sync Tasks provides configuration options to encrypt data before it is transmitted and to keep it in the encrypted format while stored on the cloud. The filenames can also be encrypted.

Support has been added for Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs).

OpenZFS is up-to-date with Illumos and slightly ahead due to support for sorted scrubs which were ported from ZFS on Linux. Notable improvements include channel programs, data disk removal, more resilient volume import, the ability to import a pool with missing vdevs, pool checkpoints, improved compressed ARC performance, and ZIL batching. Note that many of these improvements need further testing so have not yet been integrated into the UI.

Known Issues

Existing warden plugins and jails must be managed from the legacy UI. Both warden (legacy jails/plugins) and iocage (new jails/plugins) can coexist and the system supports multiple versions of the same plugin applications. This allows users to continue to use legacy plugins/jails until they have the opportunity to install and test replacements for their legacy versions using the new UI.

These plugins have been removed from the Plugins → Available listing of the new UI as they have failed qualification:

Sabnzbd

Sickrage

TinyTinyRSS

All other plugins have been tested as working,. Refer to 53790 for the RC2 plugin versions, testing details, and associated WIP tickets.